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Interns at TroopTrack

Hiring IFL (Intern for Live)
Until recently, we really struggled to provide consistent customer service. Sometimes we were awesome – customers would put in a ticket on a weekend in the wee hours and would get a response right away. Other times… not so great. It was hard to provide consistent customers service when it was just Shannon and I and TroopTrack was growing so rapidly that it was clear we couldn’t do it ourselves. Things got worse when Shannon had to take a leave of absence for a family crisis. We soon found ourselves staring at more than a thousand open help desk tickets. It had gone from kind of bad to horrible.

During this time we experimented with hiring free-lancers to help with customer service. These were typically people with experience in scouting who thought they had extra time. We would train them on TroopTrack basics, then expect them to answer questions. This sometimes worked okay, but never great. The biggest problem was consistency. No one had a set schedule, so we never knew when someone would work. People always seemed to be busier than they thought.

We were feeling pretty desperate, and then one day I thought of my nephew Spencer who was due to return home from a two-year sabbatical in Brazil and would have five months at home before he went back to school. He is smart, technical, and needed a job to pay for his return to school. By smart, I mean super smart – he has a full-tuition academic scholarship to an excellent university.

I hired Spencer for $10/hour, forty hours a week and put him to work on the help desk. I gave him a Macbook Air, set up a local environment so he could run TT locally, pointed him at the queue of questions in the help desk and said “Figure it out”.

And he did. He occasionally asked us questions, but for the most part he used his brains and curiosity to become an expert user in a very short time. Every day, the first thing he does is answer every new help desk ticket. As a result, our customers get a response within a business day. This appears to have affected our conversion rate from trial customers to paying customers in a good way:

Two months of data is hardly conclusive, but the early indications are good that we are achieving a more consistent conversion rate than we have had in the past.

Our second intern, Coleman, starts tomorrow. Spencer is going to provide most of his training.

We call Spencer IFL, short for Intern for Life, and pronounced ‘Eifel’.

Here are some details about our internship program that I think may be helpful to other bootstrappers who are considering using interns.

Payment
Our interns all start at $10/hour. The most they can earn as an intern is $15/hour. I give them a $1 raise ever 4 – 8 weeks if they perform well until they hit the max. Once they hit the max, they are stuck there until they become an Apprentice.

An apprentice can earn up to $25/hour. To become an apprentice, an intern completes a special project that demonstrates an aptitude and passion for programming as well as a basic understanding of important programmer topics like SCM, TDD, etc. Once they complete their project they present it to the three C’s (CEO, CTO, and COO) and we decide collectively to promote them to apprentice. We don’t have any apprentices yet, but Spencer is working diligently on his project. I mention this to illustrate two things 1) it’s theory and 2) we have a plan.

An apprentice can eventually become a programmer. To become a programmer the apprentice has to achieve competency in our technology stack and be able to work relatively independently to solve problems and create features. A programmer can earn up to $50/hour.

A TroopTrack employee can progress through all of these stages as a part-time employee, which means that our interns can continue to work for TT after the summer is over and they start back in school.

The gist of all this is that an internship at TroopTrack is a good opportunity. It is totally possible that a sophomore or junior in college could start as an intern at TroopTrack and be a programmer by the time they graduate, finding themselves in a position where their earning potential is considerably higher than their peers.

Schedule
Interns are young. Spencer is very smart and mature for his age, but he’s still a kid. It’s important to establish a set schedule and expect interns to keep it. They need to understand that consistency and reliability are important and that their continued earning growth is dependent on demonstrating those qualities. I have been very frank about this with IFL and will have this very conversation with IFL #2 tomorrow.

Assigning Tasks
Spencer’s primary responsibility is the help desk. But he also answers the phone, changes the trash, vacuums the office, and hauls stuff from my truck up the stairs to our office when I need him to. We also expect him to advance his programming knowledge, fix bugs, and add new features to TroopTrack that are within his wheelhouse. We give him pretty wide control over what he works on in the same way that my parents did: “You can play with your friends when your chores are done.”

This means simply that he needs to get our helpdesk back down to inbox 0 every morning before he does anything else. After that, he can learn ruby, fix bugs, or work on his apprenticeship project.

Establishing these priorities has been important – they mirror the priorities of our company and they create a healthy incentive to do what matters most NOW before moving on to activities with a more speculative value.

Hiring
There are two types of luck:
1) Sheer luck, like winning the lottery or dying in a plane crash.
2) Exploiting a chance opportunity for which you have prepared.

Spencer is awesome, and I don’t deny that he is a lucky hire for us. But it is luck #2, not luck #1. Our experiments with freelancers, our discussions about career progression, and our attempts to manage the helpdesk ourselves put us in a position to fully take advantage of the fact that a very smart kid with nothing to do was within arms reach.

There was still some luck involved and I shouldn’t pretend that I know a lot about hiring interns. There are a few things I think are important.

1) You need to present a learning opportunity. Interns are students – their career is learning. If they aren’t interested in a learning opportunity you have dodged a bullet by not hiring them. If you don’t have a learning opportunity to offer you won’t get the best candidates.
2) Hire someone who wants to learn to program. This is not the same thing as hiring a CS major. People choose majors for a rainbow of reasons – don’t assume that someone who is studying CS wants to learn to program or that someone who is study Ancient Roman Literature doesn’t.
3) Hire someone you know if you can. I have known Spencer his entire life. I know his pros and his cons. I knew before I hired him that he would need phone coaching. I also knew that he would soak up programming concepts like a sponge.

Learning
We hired Spencer and handed him two books and a bunch of web sites. The books were Learn to Program and Agile Web Development with Rails 4. I told him to work through the books every day AFTER he finished the helpdesk. Within a week I could tell that Spencer had an aptitude for programming. The web sites we handed him were about git and github.